The Longest Date: Life as a Wife Read Online Free Page A

sure my kids wouldn’t be bastards.
    Finally the rabbi called and said he could see us. When we arrived, all of us, he explained the process might take another hour, so my ex-husband told his family he would call them when we were done.
    The rabbi was old, and his two witnesses were even older. They sat on one side of a table and we sat on the other. We had to say our names in Hebrew, which already was a problem because mine was supposedly Ariel, but I was told in Sunday school that the female version of Ariel is Ariella. Feeling strongly that somebody should be the female version of me in this process, I went with Ariella. We also had to state that we had come freely without coercion, and then we watched in respectful silence as the rabbi, who was also officially a scribe, wrote our divorce document by hand, with pen and ink, in Hebrew.
    After what seemed like an eternity, the document was only half finished. When my ex-husband left to feed the meter, the rabbi fixed me with a stare and asked the question that had clearly been bothering him since we arrived: “Who was that other man who came with you?” Since I wasn’t sure what the official Orthodox stance was on homosexuality, I said it was my ex-husband’s friend. “And whose children were those?” he asked. I didn’t like where this was going. I asked if this would affect the get process, because we had been there a long time as it was. He assured me it would not, so I admitted that my ex-husband was gay, and that the other man was his partner, and those were their kids.
    The two ancient witnesses looked at each other, which was the first and only indication that they spoke English.
    “I think that’s sick,” the rabbi said flatly.
    “It’s not sick,” I said. “They’re very happy.”
    Then, in a terribly unoriginal attempt at a joke, the rabbi said, “Which one is the man?”
    “They’re both men,” I said. “They’re both very good men.”
    When my ex-husband came back into the room, I felt ill. I had flown cross-country, paid five hundred dollars, and dragged him to a warehouse so some Rent-a-Rabbi and his Manischewitz drinking buddies could sit in judgment of him. And the irony was, he was the practicing Jew, not I. I was fuming, wondering if we should forget the get, get out, get while the gettin’ was good. I was composing an angry letter in my head, venting to the hot rabbi, praying this wasn’t representative of my faith, when we were informed that our document was complete. Then we were asked to stand. And face each other. And then my ex-husband was asked to look into my eyes and repeat some phrases that meant basically “With this document, I release you.”
    And as we stood there, just as we had on our wedding day, he looked even more handsome. And grown-up. And happy. And I thought about why he had married me in the first place. Yes, he loved me, but also, he was probably afraid he would never be able to have a family if he didn’t marry a woman. And now he had that family without having had to compromise any part of who he was. And I thought about what he had given me all of those years ago when he had unofficially released me. He gave me my single life back. And as much as I hated the heartbreak and longing, it became the basis of my writing career, which led me to a job on
Sex and the City
, which led me to New York, which led me to my tattooed lawyer/poet/chef.
    And then I thought about how this tribunal, this ridiculous judgmental tribunal, was what my ex-husband faced every day, sometimes when he least expected it, sometimes from family, sometimes from within, and realized how hard it must have been for him to overcome that judgment in order to be honest with me and with himself. So, as he dropped the get into my open palms, which made it legally binding, I felt proud of him, and proud of us, for releasing each other to our proper destinies.
    “I’m happy you’re getting married,” he said. “Now I can finally stop feeling